The ragged yellow tent perched early one recent morning on a site in Gordon Gulch near Nederland held three young people. They were passing a joint that filled much of the space not occupied by a tangled mess of blankets, sleeping bags and random provisions with a pungent blue smoke.

Two young women, one young man. No pictures, please. No names, either.

The trio didn't have much interest in discussing increasing problems posed by transients, displaced families and others camping long term on national forest land in Boulder County — other than to suggest that placing dumpsters at campsites and hiring more rangers would sure help.

"Man, I'm just up here trying to celebrate my birthday," the bleary-eyed young man protested, suggesting the group be left in mellow peace.

A few miles to the south, at the U.S. Forest Service's West Magnolia campground, another cluster of campers was far more receptive.

Their site was littered with more refuse than most outdoors enthusiasts would tolerate. But you should have seen it before, they said.

"It was trashed when we got here, so I understand what the people down there (Nederland) are complaining about," said Alex Fearday, 20. An Illinois native, he left his "boring" hometown for Colorado's seemingly greener pastures and had been in state about a week. "We pretty well cleaned this whole place up."

Fearday, sporting 2-inch ornamental spikes driven through both earlobes, spoke as he stood by a smoldering campfire at the center of a site still littered with the detritus of hard living on the land. He described what his party of five had found on arrival.

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"There was three or four tents just flattened, destroyed. There was a box with cans and trash. There was all these old blankets, scattered over the fencing. Just a lot of miscellaneous stuff." Gesturing vaguely with the stout tree limb with which he was tending the fire, he said, "There's a trash bag we've been putting stuff in."

But clearly, their janitorial project was still a work in progress.

As Fearday spoke, Anna Begley, the wife of one of his buddies, was ensconced in a nearby tent with her 10-month-old daughter, Liberty. Begley's route to West Magnolia had been less direct than Fearday's.

"Before this, I was in Boulder, and then before that, Idaho, and before that, Humboldt County, Calif. — that's where I grew up — and North Dakota. And I lived in Colorado for two years previously ... And I'm here again," said Begley, 27, as her daughter crawled into her lap.

Begley, who claimed a music arts degree from Humboldt State University, doesn't consider herself homeless. Home, she contended, is where her family is. At the moment, that was in the woods. Which, she said with a disapproving glance out her tent flap, could really use some work.

Graphic by Karen Antonacci

"Always leave it cleaner than when you found it," she said she'd been taught. "I can't let my daughter crawl around, out there. I have to lock her in her stroller or put her in the tent, because I don't know what she's going to pick up. There's baggies around, and glass, and who knows?

"They're seriously considering closing all camping to the public up here, because of people who don't clean up after themselves."

Anna Begley and her 10-month-old daughter, Liberty, were part of a small group of campers earlier this month at the West Magnolia campground outside Nederland. She said she was not homeless, defining "home" as where her family is. Her group did clean up their site before leaving. (Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer)

But authorities are struggling to find a solution — or a menu of solutions — to a problem they say is increasing at what should be one of the public's greatest natural assets on Colorado's Front Range.

Instead, several camping areas in western Boulder County are becoming no-go zones to families. Hansen Wendlandt, pastor at the Nederland Community Presbyterian Church, said an Iraq war veteran who stumbled upon one area encampment two years ago compared it to the climactic scene from "Apocalypse Now," saying, "The closer you got, the weirder it was."

USFS designated-dispersed areas are free, do not have amenities such as picnic tables, restrooms or electrical hookups, but are typically marked as such and sometimes include an established fire ring.

The rules are that nobody can occupy one for more than 14 consecutive days or 28 days in a 60-day period. And the fundamental outdoorsman's credo applies: Pack it in, and pack it out.

Enforcing the regulations is extremely difficult for agencies faced with limited resources. And increasingly, federal and local officials are finding that the pressure on such camp areas from the homeless, the disenfranchised and those who have chosen to drop out of society is mounting and taking a heavy toll.

The problem is hardly isolated to national forests in Boulder County. The phenomenon has received attention at the national level, and was the subject of a USFS-commissioned study in 2014, led by Josh Baur, an assistant professor in the Department of Health Science and Recreation at San Jose State University.

Boulder County Sheriff's Office records show that the number of calls handled between West Magnolia, Gordon Gulch and Ruby Gulch shot up from 213 in 2013 to 294 in 2014 and hit 388 in 2015. Counting calls through April of this year, the three have registered 1,012, dating back to the start of 2013.

Of those three sites, West Magnolia — a short distance south of Nederland on Colo. 119 — sees the most visits by police or fire officials. The highest classification of calls at all three of those areas consistently is for "extra patrol" — essentially, deputies proactively checking for potential problems.

From persistent issues with accumulated trash ranging to fears of a catastrophic blaze sparked by an abandoned campfire, the cumulative effects of homeless or transients camping on the national forest have some saying the situation has reached full boil.

"We're at a crisis point," said Boulder County Undersheriff Tommy Sloan.

Referring to the associated trash problem, John Thompson, who with his wife owns Nederland's Mountain Man Outdoor Store, said, "It's an atrocity."

Chris Current, executive director of the Nederland Food Pantry, said: "The fire department is called out every single day, with illegal campfires. You look at that Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, and it's terrifying to us because we're surrounded the same way."

Fire danger is one issue — a big one. So is basic hygiene.

"At West Magnolia, there is no running water," said Nederland Fire Protection District Chief Rick Dirr. "All of these people, their excrement is scattered throughout the woods. There aren't any bathrooms. From a biohazard, or whatever perspective ... now we've just got a lot of people crapping in the woods.. And that's not the experience I want my kids to have."

Reid Armstrong, spokeswoman for the Arapaho & Roosevelt National Forests Boulder Ranger District, said the agency is fully aware of the growing problem — and also said a significant challenge is that it must be solved within the broader context of the public at large and its right to enjoy the national forests.

"Nothing has floated to the surface as the magic bullet, or a perfect solution," Armstrong said. "Right now, our focus is on community involvement and changing the behavior, and looking at the facts.

"We're talking about 2 million people on the Front Range who are using 160,000 acres, and the impact that that is having on the landscape is significant. And it is more than just what is happening with the campers in this one area."

But some campers in the Nederland area and along the Peak to Peak Highway — many of whom are simply living there throughout the year — are having multiple negative impacts in western Boulder communities.

Babes in the woods

While there may be no magic bullet, that doesn't mean people aren't looking.

The man currently spearheading NICHE — which pulls together members from the Forest Service, the Boulder County Sheriff's Office, the Nederland Police Department, Foothills United Way, members of the business community and more — is Wendlandt, who presides at Nederland Community Presbyterian Church.

He echoed Armstrong's contention that there's no simple solution to the multiple issues posed by transient populations taking up residence in the forest.

"There's no model. There's no best practices," said Wendlandt, who estimates there are as many as 400 people who call the nearby forest home at one time or another through the year. "There is a lot of awareness spreading, and I guess our group is kind of at the tip of the spear as to how to deal with it, around the country."

He runs a program called Summer Socks and Sandwiches, through which each Thursday morning between Memorial Day and Labor Day, campers can come by the church for free sandwiches, cleaning supplies, trash bags — and some friendly encouragement to being good neighbors. Last year, 300 pairs of socks were distributed.

Wendlandt has only been pastor at the Nederland church for about three years. But already, he is noticing a change in the campers' patterns.

"Since I've been here, a lot more homeless people are coming up in the off months," he said. "I've had people in my office in January, February and March, coming in, in the middle of huge snowstorms. We're going to have somebody die of the cold. It's going to happen sometime."

An expanding "season" is one way the phenomenon is changing. Another is the demographics.

"It is not an easy problem to understand. They are not just, blanket 'homeless,'" said Amy Hardy, community resilience director at Foothills United Way and a NICHE team member. "It feels like we have a small subset of homeless families. We had two babies born in the woods last summer." She repeated, "Two babies, born in the woods."

Current, at the Nederland Food Pantry, can provide what she calls camper bags to those who need help with provisions, but only once a month, and only to those who show proof of identification.

"It's enough food for a day," said Current, whose facility is supported through donations and a partnership with Boulder County Community Food Share. She emptied out a sample plastic bag. "It's a small jar of peanut butter, it's a bottle of water, it's a package of crackers, sunflowers seeds, some quinoa or couscous. It's not a lot.

"I don't have resources to keep doing food, every day. I would love to do more, but then I'm in conflict with the town, too, who doesn't want people starting fires in the woods."

It's the increasing frequency of families living off the forest service land that most bothers some of those who are providing human services.

"There's more families, and that breaks my heart," Current said. "And, some of the seniors I see really have medical issues that aren't being addressed. And that's heartbreaking, too. I don't know why they can't get into the system, to get some of that resolved."

Isabel McDevitt, executive director of Bridge House in Boulder County, is more well-versed in addressing the problems associated with homeless or transient people in Boulder than of those in the high country.

But she said the problems experienced near Nederland, to a degree, are very much of a piece with what is also being confronted in Front Range cities.

"Nederland is part of Boulder County and typically the conversations around affordable housing and services don't always extend up into the western part of the county. And obviously it needs to, given that many of the services are located more in Boulder and Longmont," she said.

"But clearly, people are going where they can find a place to camp, and are looking in all parts of the county for resources."

'Move On'

Thompson, the co-owner of the Mountain Man Outdoor Store, voiced a degree of compassion for some of the people living in the forest. And he's one more person trying to be part of the solution; he spent part of a recent Saturday helping to clean up the West Magnolia campsite.

"I lived in San Francisco for 15 years, and for a year and a half of that, I was homeless. So I am well versed in what the good and bad of the situation is," Thompson said.

"Some people, they have nothing else that they can do. But there's a fair amount of people who do it because, 'Oh it's free, I can live up in the woods for the summer, not pay any money and just do whatever I want.'"

Theft from stores — his and others — is one more problem linked to the issue.

"They use all sorts of techniques and tactics, so they're doing it knowingly," said Paul Carrill, the town marshal. "We've had examples of the sole individual shoplifter, all the way up to the swarming of a dozen transients into the grocery store, all taking things beyond the ability of the shop owner or law enforcement to grab all of them at once.

"That scares and upsets a community and the business owner, so we're addressing those types of things directly and severely."

Several people interviewed invoked the legalization of marijuana as just one more lure for some of the out-of-state itinerant to Colorado national forest lands — despite the fact that using it on federal lands is illegal. Begley, the young mother tending her baby in a tent, was of those happy to see the Colorado give pot the green light.

"I'm from Humboldt County, Calif., so obviously, I'm going to be promoting marijuana," she said. "I mean, marijuana has helped me. Marijuana has got me off harder drugs. Marijuana has helped me raise my children ... I think Colorado is on the right path."

Meanwhile, whether Nederland and its neighbors are on course to correct problems associated with people living in the national forest remains to be seen. Tools being employed even include Boulder County Jail inmates, periodically being taken on work details to campgrounds that need cleanup or rehabilitation.

"I think we can solve this problem," said Hall, creator of the "Transients/troublemakers" Facebook page. "I think there are always going to be transients and troublemakers moving through this area. That has been the case for 50 years.

"But, part of that sentence is, 'moving through.' Leave the forest. Leave it as you found it. And then move on."

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